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Marketing

How To Keep Your Email Marketing Campaigns From Sucking

You know good email marketing campaigns when you receive them. It's what separates the emails you actually open from the ones you instantly delete.

How To Keep Your Email Marketing From SuckingYou know a good email marketing campaign when you receive it. It’s what separates the emails you actually open from the ones you instantly delete. The ones you like usually have a combination of things done right – great content, easy to read formats and speak directly to your interests or needs. Our friends at NextAdvisor shared these tips to help businesses kick start and maintain an effective marketing campaign.

How to Maintain Email Marketing Success:

From selecting the right email marketing service to growing your subscriber list and creating click-worthy content, there’s a lot to take into consideration when it comes to creating a successful email marketing campaign. And in the age of the Internet, it’s imperative that all businesses have an online presence, complete with a website, a social media presence and email newsletters. To help you with the latter, we’ve detailed five ways to help you maintain email marketing success with every campaign you create.

Be mindful of your subject lines

There are many factors to consider when creating your email campaign’s subject line. While it may be tempting, focusing only on “click bait” or a catchy subject line to ensure your email campaigns get opened isn’t the best route to go, as you could mislead your subscribers to what your email actually entails. Instead, think about your target audience and what they’d like to read about. Keep your subject line short, simple and to the point. It should clearly, but concisely tell your subscribers what’s inside the email without having to guess.

Clean up your subscriber list

You will probably have a short list of subscribers when you first begin your email marketing campaigns, but as you beef up your campaigns and increase the number of your subscribers, the list of email addresses you have will be hard to keep track of. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to bounce backs or undeliverable emails every time you send out a new campaign. Make it a priority to go through your subscriber email list regularly and clear out any inactive email addresses. Equally as important is paying attention to which email addresses are sending your campaigns directly to spam or trash without even opening them, as these are ways subscribers show you they don’t want to be on your list — which brings us to our next tip.

Include an easy way to unsubscribe

If certain subscribers are constantly sending your campaigns to the spam or trash folder, they aren’t reading your content, and annoying your customer base could be damaging to your company’s reputation. This is why it’s essential for you to include a way for your customers to unsubscribe and make the process as easy and effortless as possible. The best way to do this is to include a simple unsubscribe button in every campaign you send out. You can also give new subscribers the option to sign up for what type of content interests them the most or even how frequently they’d like to receive your email newsletter, whether it’s once a week or once a month.

Test multiple campaigns

Before you send a campaign out to your entire subscriber list, you’ll want to test a few different versions out first. Many email marketing services, like MailChimp, give you user-friendly tools that do this for you. MailChimp’s A/B Split Campaign feature, for example, will automatically create two different versions of the same campaign. You can then select who you’d like to send it to, whether it’s just you or a team of your colleagues, so you can see what it looks like in an email inbox, on both desktop and mobile.

Track your campaigns

Many of these services offer real-time reports complete with full analytics of when your campaigns have been opened and which links in your campaign were actually clicked on by your subscribers. This helps you gauge what content works and doesn’t work with your audience so that you can adjust accordingly. You can also include sign-up forms on your website and social media platforms to see where the majority of your traffic and subscribers are coming from.

Jessa is a NextAdvisor.com writer who covers genealogy, email marketing, fashion clubs, online video, home security, Internet fax, diet programs, website building and parental controls. Her writing has been published by The Huffington Post, Elite Daily, American City Business Journals, Succeed As Your Own Boss, Small Biz Daily and others. Jessa has been interviewed by Intuit QuickBooks for her email marketing expertise and cited on Fashionista Chicago for her reviews on fashion clubs. She is a graduate of Temple University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Journalism and Mass Media, and currently resides in San Francisco. You can follow her on Twitter @JessaAdvisor.

 

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